Whitley Strieber is the author of Communion1 (1987),2 an account of his own claimed encounters with beings he refers to as the visitors.3 Ross Coulthart has described him as a controversial and leading figure in the study of alleged experiencer close encounters.4 He has written over thirty novels and non-fiction works,5 and Communion, together with its sequel Breakthrough, are described as his bestselling titles.6 Communion sold millions of copies2 and, according to Ross Coulthart, was a New York Times bestseller.7 After its publication Strieber received thousands of letters from readers reporting similar encounters,8 and the cover painting created for the book helped entrench the “gray” alien stereotype in public consciousness.9 Coulthart has said he has met many people whose own encounter experiences were triggered by the image of the grey alien on that cover.10
Strieber’s accounts of his own alleged abduction experiences began at his remote cabin in upstate New York11 in December 1985. He initially believed he had been assaulted by people wearing masks and did not connect the experience with aliens,12 though he had been severely injured in some areas, and the injuries took him to a doctor.13 He involved the New York State Criminal Investigation Division, but they could do nothing because he had no evidence.14 After reading Science and the UFOs, he telephoned Budd Hopkins.15 Hopkins wanted to hypnotise him, but Strieber refused because Hopkins, an artist, displayed no professional degrees;16 he also chose not to approach any hypnotist to whom Hopkins had made previous referrals.17 Hopkins instead put him in touch with Donald Klein, who then hypnotised him.18 Klein induced hypnosis using an eye-fixation technique with his finger, followed by relaxation and warmth suggestions,19 after Strieber underwent a three-hour pre-interview and provided him with a document outlining his memories of the visitor experiences.2021 Hopkins was present at the resulting sessions, recording them and permitted to ask questions only at their end.22
Under hypnosis, Strieber came to recall that he had apparently been abducted by non-human beings rather than assaulted by people in masks.23 According to Communion, the 1986 hypnosis session March 1 recovered his memories of the 1985 abduction experience October 4.24 He recalled waking to see something pass an octagonal window beneath the peak of his living room’s cathedral ceiling,25 then a dark shape about a metre tall standing in the far corner of his bedroom, appearing hooded with no visible head,2627 which approached his bed making a sucking, smacking, squeaking sound as if pressing something into his mind.28 He recalled planning to take guests, including Jacques Sandulescu and his girlfriend Annie Gottlieb, to the country for the weekend.29 In a second induction during the same session, he recalled a small being with a mean-looking face, large slanted eyes and a bald head, holding a silver-tipped, ruler-like object that touched his head and produced visions of a nuclear blast,30 accompanied by a voice telling him “That’s your home”.31 He recalled screaming for a prolonged twenty seconds before spontaneously emerging from hypnosis, describing the fear he relived as more raw and profound than any he had previously experienced.32 Regarding the 1985 abduction experience December 26, he recalled finding himself in a messy, round room, overwhelmed by dread and a sense that his personality had completely evaporated,33 and asking, under hypnosis, to go home and to remain with his mother, his wife Anne Strieber and their son Andrew Strieber.34 The same hypnotic process reached back further, to a 1957 train trip abduction memory from when Strieber was twelve: he recalled his father, Karl Strieber, standing up, appearing terrified, and making a convulsive mouth movement as though trying to get something out of his throat.35
By mid-1986, Strieber and Anne Strieber were discussing whether to attempt to re-establish contact with the visitors or to leave the cabin permanently.36 Strieber has said Anne urged him to go back to the woods where the first encounter had happened, to show the visitors he was interested, while she herself declined to go into the woods because she needed to care for their son.3738 After three or four attempts, Strieber went alone into the woods at night, and the visitors appeared within a few days and began coming to the house.39 Within a year, they were coming to the cabin while gathered friends and correspondents were present.40 His book Transformation names thirty-one witnesses, many of whom had experiences at the cabin,41 though Strieber does not believe any of them saw the visitors engaging with him personally; each had their own encounters.42
In January 1987, Strieber had been going nightly to the clearing near the cabin where the visitors first appeared, after asking them for a meeting.43 Just before dawn one morning he heard a low, mournful, horn-like sound from the woods,44 and from a hill above the clearing saw a dark object with figures standing in front of it.45 A harsh voice in his head said “come on, come on”, frightening him into turning back;46 he feared he might not return and could not disappear on his wife and son.47 As he touched the doorknob of the cabin, he heard three cries above the forest that sounded like disappointment, which he describes as not of this world.48 For a year afterwards, classical music sounded muddy and indistinct to him.49 Sitting on his bedside, he felt an invisible presence directly in front of him,50 and came to believe the visitors had taken his adult consciousness back into his infant body at the moment he first walked, breaking through his childhood amnesia.51
In 1988, while making the Communion film, Strieber and Anne Strieber travelled to Roswell to meet surviving witnesses of the 1947 Roswell UFO incident.52 In a letter to Senator Strom Thurmond dated 1997-06-16,53 Strieber wrote that United States Army Brigadier General Arthur Exon had told him personally in 1989 that there was a “completely unequivocal cover-up” of a retrieved alien craft at Roswell, New Mexico, that “went from Truman on down”.54 In his 2025 book The Fourth Mind, Strieber wrote that the US Department of Defense ensures that no one outside a small, security-cleared group has definite knowledge of matters concerning nonhuman visitors,55 and that every US presidential administration since Harry Truman in 1947 has kept the secret.56 He noted that the US government classifies between 60 million and 70 million documents a year.57 He wrote that much is already known about UAP and some of their occupants within the US defence establishment, concentrated on materials and biology rather than on aims, motives or the soul.58 The book also drew on an anonymous Reddit document on nonhuman anatomy referenced in one of Strieber’s recent books; according to Chris Ramsay, an alleged whistleblower who had worked on crash-retrieval bodies was described in it as a biologist and geneticist who had examined the blood, organs, eyes and fingers of the beings.59 Strieber has said the contact experience with the beings is primarily about the human soul rather than the body,60 and that the beings understand the soul and the afterlife in ways he believes humans do not.61